


no other shade of blue but you

by GraceNM



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, First Time, angsty happiness, getting out of the city, post-Punisher Season 2, the healing power of sex :)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-17
Updated: 2020-11-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:07:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27567244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GraceNM/pseuds/GraceNM
Summary: “What did you do?” she asked quietly, calmly, though a thin red thread of alarm laced through each word.“I know what you’re thinking,” Frank said. “But not like that.”“How then?” She didn’t have time for this, for the read-my-mind games.He jerked his chin. “With you,” he said. “I fucked up with you.”
Relationships: Frank Castle/Karen Page
Comments: 28
Kudos: 102





	no other shade of blue but you

**Author's Note:**

> Writing Kastle intimidates me, but I was craving some soft Frank, so here we are :)
> 
> Title from [hoax](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryLGxpjwAhM). Thank you to [ Mrs Gordo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrsGordo/pseuds/Mrs%20Gordo) for always being there for me, and for reading this story first.

Karen didn’t really start breathing again until the city glittered in the rearview, out of reach.

She rubbed her neck absent-mindedly, running her fingers down to the jewel of her mother’s necklace, too flustered over the man sitting next to her to analyze why leaving New York felt like taking off some kind of collar.

It was her car, but Frank was driving. Again.

If they were sticking to the clogged streets in the city, to a traffic grid now more familiar to her than the lines on her own palms, she might not have handed him the keys. But this was open highway, now. This was darkness and guardrails and speed.

And maybe the grip she had on him was barely a fingernail deep, but he was here, and she wasn’t eager to put her own treacherous hands on the wheel.

"Heat OK?" Frank asked, and Karen immediately pressed her fingers against her flaming cheek. She didn't think he could see her well enough to notice in the stuttering light of the highway, but she leaned over to adjust the temperature down.

"Maybe a little warm," she said.

He just nodded, his eyes focused on the road. “Let me know if you need to stop.”

“Really?” she asked teasingly. “You’re not one of those ‘no stopping unless we’re literally running out of gas’ types?”

This time, his eyes darted to hers in the mirror, and her mouth went dry at their intensity.

“Getting there’s not really the point, is it?”

* * *

She hadn’t been prepared at all when she opened her apartment door earlier that night. She hadn’t been prepared for the sight of him or for the words that came out of his mouth.

“I fucked up,” he said, and her hand clenched into a frustrated fist at the same time that her heart fell right through the floor.

She wasn’t sure she could go through this, not again, but he was spattered with blood and dirt and she had _neighbors_ , so she stepped back and gestured him over the threshold. A first small surrender.

Inside, he just looked at her. All he did was look and already it was too much. She crossed her arms over her chest, a meager maneuver toward holding the line.

“What did you do?” she asked quietly, calmly, though a thin red thread of alarm laced through each word.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Frank said. “But not like that.”

“How then?” She didn’t have time for this, for the read-my-mind games.

He jerked his chin. “With you,” he said. “I fucked up with you.”

She swallowed hard. “Yeah, you did,” she breathed, through lips that trembled traitorously. She closed her eyes, pressed her mouth into a line, before meeting his gaze again. "So what?"

"So...nothing." He turned his face to the floor. "Just thought you might want to know. That I know."

"What, specifically, do you know?" She tried to keep her voice firm, but the very question betrayed her, and she caught the slightest quirk of relief in his face.

"That I'm a goddamn liar."

"You don't lie to me," she challenged.

"I did." His eyes followed the movement as she bit her lip. "You know when, Karen?"

She shook her head, a flushed, prickly heat rising from between her breasts and climbing up her neck.

"When I said I didn't want to,” he said, swaying tentatively, a sailor relearning the shore. “That was the lie."

She blinked, and tried to keep breathing. "But what does that mean now?"

"Way I see it, there's only one question.” His fingers twitched at his side. “That offer still good?"

"No," she said immediately, then covered her mouth with her hand, surprised at herself. But at his stricken expression, the corners of her lips turned up and her fingers fell away. "But I'll listen. If you’re here to make me one."

The warmth in his eyes wrapped her up like a bulletproof vest. "How about...we go away for a few days, just you and me, and we...we just see," he said. "I want...I want to know you."

Something hot and heavy snaked through her. "You know me," she said softly.

"More."

She had to let that word shiver all the way down her spine before she could respond. "How long do I have to decide?" she asked, as casually as she could manage.

"Long as you need." Half of his mouth lifted. “We could leave tonight.”

"Are you on the run?" All at once, skepticism threatened to curdle the nascent feeling in her chest — the one that just might be joy.

He shook his head. "Not any more than usual."

Her smile broke out then, sun through the clouds, and she nodded. “OK.”

“OK? We’re doing this?”

“We’re doing this.”

* * *

She’d expected to kiss him then. She’d moved closer, pulled to him like a stone sinking through water, but he held up a hand and gestured to his bloody, messy self.

"Not like this," he said. And she wanted to protest _I don't care_ , but it was for him that she stopped. He didn't want it to be like this. He was maybe choosing something new, instead of another war, and he didn't want their first kiss tinged by the battlefield, even if that seemed fitting to her.

"I'll get cleaned up. And we'll go."

He gave her an address. She had an hour to pack a bag before meeting him there.

It didn't take much to leave her life behind. Just a call to Foggy to say she had a family thing in Vermont — nothing too serious, but it would take a few days — and then an email with her latest case notes all clearly labeled, explained and attached. Foggy wouldn't make a fuss. Not only because Foggy was Foggy but because Karen never took time off. Not since that day in the hospital. She’d walked out in her bare feet and never stopped moving.

At first, she tried to pretend Frank was out of her life for good, but that approach worked about as well as it had in the past, which was to say not at all. Somehow, someway, someday, she knew she would see him again.

Amid the interviews and the stakeouts and the paperwork, in the space between too much coffee and too few dreams, she kept tabs on him. He was harder to track by paper trail these days — the cops tended to lay any bloody crime that got the best of them at his feet — but she could always pick out his M.O. There was always that prickling over the back of her neck when she knew it was him, even after long stretches of no real news.

And then there was that night in the alley, weeks ago now. She was on a stakeout, nibbling at some godforsaken granola bar she’d unsmushed from the bottom of her bag, when she heard a scuffling from the shadows around one of the buildings. She’d gotten out to investigate, catching the tiniest glimpse of a man in black disappearing around the corner. But even in that split-second, the line of his back, the curve of his shoulders, gave her that same tingle of recognition.

She’d never found her mark, the exceedingly shady character she was tracking for her case. He just up and vanished after that night. And if she had to guess—

Well, it pissed her off, because she could handle herself.

But maybe Frank was keeping tabs on her, too.

* * *

For a while, they only talked about practical things — directions, gas, a place to sleep.

But when enough quiet miles had passed that Karen was sure this was really happening, that he wouldn’t disappear in a clanging clamor or a swirl of smoke, she finally asked the question, the one she probably should have asked before they left.

“Why now, Frank?”

He tensed his hand on the steering wheel. She waited.

“I guess…what you said, it wouldn’t leave me alone.”

That made two of them. God, how many times had she played that last conversation over in her mind, sifting it for her mistakes, picking at her failures until they bled.

“I told you there was no light,” Frank said after a stretch of silence. “But when I looked at you the other night...it was different.”

So it _was_ him, in the alley. Of course it was. But her anger had abandoned her.

She put her hand on his arm. “I missed you,” she said, thinking of that night and how he’d eluded her, but also of the simple truth she’d lived with every single day.

She knew there must be more to what brought him back to her, that this was just the first layer of the story, but for now it was enough that she was touching him, that they were moving in the same direction.

* * *

They pulled up to the house a few hours before dawn. Karen had booked it while they drove. A tidy white farmhouse set in a clearing, surrounded by woods. Classic New England, the style that reminded her of her grandmother’s old place.

They’d stopped not too long before to fill up the gas tank, so there was no rush for the door. Karen sat still in her seat, listening to the engine click as it cooled, gripping her shaky knees. Getting here hadn’t been the point, but now that they’d arrived…

“Ready?” Frank asked, and she gathered herself together, opening her door before she could think any more about what lay ahead. They would go inside the house, and then whatever was going to happen would happen.

But they didn’t even make it to the front door.

It was the stars that did it. Karen had barely been out of the city since moving there, and jesus, she’d forgotten how many you could see on a clear night. As she walked toward the light of the front porch, she gaped up at them, gasping out a highly original, “Wow.” But when she glanced over at Frank, he wasn’t looking up. He was watching her.

She forgot about the stars. She forgot about everything.

Frank’s nose was cold, but his lips were warm, and their first kiss tasted not of the battlefield, but of country air and dewdrops and the last sip of his travel-cup black coffee. She drank him in greedily after so much time waiting, her every cell singing _yes_.

Yes, this.

Yes, finally.

Yes, _him_.

Frank’s kisses were clear as a signature — careful and ardent and gentle and demanding. Full of safety but edged in risk. She chased all of him, every flavor and feeling, with her lips and her hands until finally she brought him down in a tumble.

“We should go in,” he murmured next to her ear as her arms wrapped around his neck.

“Mmhmm,” she agreed, bringing her thighs up around his hips, the damp that was seeping through the back of her getaway sweatshirt unable to quench the fever of her skin. He indulged her in this springy patch of clover, his mouth traveling over her face, down her neck, until she was bright with heat.

He got impatient then, and he hauled her to her feet. He followed her hazy instructions about how to unlock the front door before sweeping her up and carrying her over the threshold like a bride. Inside it was dry and it smelled like homemade bread, and they could make time for practical things, like beds.

But she hoped the fresh grass stains on his knees never came out in the wash.

* * *

It was all layers, then. Wet boots discarded, hardware safely stowed, and then came the softer stuff — jeans, her sweatshirt, his dark henley. Till there was only thin cotton left, and skin.

Karen sat on the edge of the bed in her underwear, Frank between her knees, tracing the lines of him with her fingertips, trying to memorize each dip and swell and scar. He tugged her hair from its ponytail, combing his fingers through the strands as he leaned down to breathe her in.

Her chin tilted back and his lips found her pulse where it raced for him. His hands lifted the hem of her tank top, slipped open the clasp of her bra, and she slid backward on the bed, lying down, beckoning him nearer.

And then her arms were around him, and her bare skin pressed against his bare skin for the first time. The sensation was both decadent and humbling, and Karen buried her face against his shoulder, her breath going ragged.

She’d never done this before. She’d never shared her body and her heart with someone she knew would take a bullet for her. Someone she would risk everything for, with a smile on her face and steel in her hand.

This was _Frank_.

They stayed like that, locked in that raw embrace, until he let out a long hitching sigh and she had to look into his eyes, to kiss his mouth, to roll herself under him, until his weight sank her into the mattress and there could be no doubt that this was real, real, real.

His big hands stroked her body, his thumb dragging over her nipple, liquid desire blossoming fresh and hot between her thighs. She gripped his biceps, her tongue tasting a trail of his skin, every inch of her achingly aware of how very much she wanted and how very long she had waited for it.

And when, later, he finally moved inside of her, she was rocked and wrecked and rescued. His presence in her life was always this, a reckoning.

What he’d always done was help her save herself.

* * *

When dawn came, Frank slept. Karen didn’t.

She’d drifted off a bit in the car, but it wasn’t that. Not really. She was just so goddamn _safe_ that she couldn’t miss a minute of it. Not yet.

The bed was not to her taste. It was overly soft and more than a little squeaky. Quills poked here and there through the feather pillows. But none of that mattered when she had the most dangerous man she’d ever known draped around her like another blanket.

She could almost relax completely, except that she worried about him. She’d seen it happen in the hospital, the familiar way the nightmares had shredded his rest.

For now, though, he seemed unhaunted. He was far from a heavy sleeper, and more than once he surfaced enough to recognize she was there. And the little sleepy smiles he gave her — those were worth living a whole life for. Those were worth acres of dreams.

The morning drowsed past her, washed in the golden light that was seeping through the faded curtains, and she only slept when Frank woke, and kissed her on the forehead above her heavy-lidded eyes, and headed toward the bathroom, his footsteps creaking over the old hardwood floor.

* * *

“Afternoon,” he greeted her when she came downstairs a few hours later. He was sitting at the dining room table, reading a tatty paperback, a simple lunch of sandwiches spread in front of him. They’d need to get real groceries soon, but the few supplies they’d packed for the trip would hold them over.

The sight of the food on the table made Karen’s stomach react hungrily, but it was the sight of Frank that made her hungrier.

She took his hand and led him back to bed.

* * *

That was how Karen did most things over the next couple of days. She listened to what her body wanted, and she gave in.

She wasn’t used to paying much attention. Usually she sort of ignored the fact that she had a body at all. She didn’t eat much, she ran on caffeine balanced by liberal portions of alcohol, she slept either hardly at all or in long crashes that left her disoriented when she awoke.

She hadn’t realized how tight she’d let her life squeeze around her neck. When Frank showed up on her doorstep, she’d been careening toward the edge, without even recognizing the abyss gaping before her.

Now that she had space to breathe, she found she craved actual meals, long walks in the fresh air, and Frank. Always Frank. They cooked together, or he cooked and she supervised, and they traded stories in the sunshine, crunching over old leaves.

Their rambles among the trees reminded her of running wild once upon a time, a woodland sprite with scraped knees and flowers in her hair. It reminded her of darker things, too — among them, that night when Frank left her alone and bleeding and she tried to convince herself that she never wanted to see him again.

But that had never been true. Every time she’d laid eyes on him since had brought some measure of relief. And right now he was the only person she wanted to see.

She felt strong and sure as she lay across his lap on the couch one night, both of them reading under the lamplight. Her hair was still slightly damp from her soak in the big clawfoot tub, where her happily sore muscles had welcomed the loosening heat.

Karen stretched luxuriously at the end of a chapter, nuzzling her face against Frank’s shirt and taking in his spicy scent. “How did you know I needed this?” she asked dreamily.

She hadn’t actually expected an answer, so she was surprised when Frank closed his book.

“You got careless,” he said. “Maybe I did too. Maybe I thought, it’d be better to try your way before...”

Before she made the mistake that killed her. Before he made the mistake he couldn’t live with.

She sat up, her back to him, her shoulders tense. She knew if he’d told her this three days ago, she would have been livid.

_I can take care of myself._

And she could. But she hadn’t been. She’d been pushing hard enough to snap.

“It’s dangerous,” Frank said. “When you get tired.”

* * *

Frank was different, after that. He got up from the couch and paced around the floor, and it was only when she heard the door that Karen realized he’d gone outside.

She stayed put, though a not-insignificant part of her wanted to run after him, to make him say more. He didn’t stay out long, but it was late, and when he came back inside, the night air sweeping in along with him, he caught her yawning.

“C’mon,” he said, heading for the stairs, and while his voice was mostly the same, all the ease had gone out of his movements.

When Karen came out of the bathroom, she found him sitting up in bed, staring into the distance. She climbed in next to him, ignoring the mattress’ creaks, which had grown all too familiar. He’d talk now. She’d been touched by that, since the first day they’d met, how he could open up to her about his family, about himself.

“Frank?” she said, and when he focused on her, she put her hand on his arm. “What’s going on in here?” She reached up and traced the circle of his temple with her finger.

“Nothing,” he said, shaking his head.

“You _are_ a goddamn liar,” she teased lightly, gently, waiting.

He huffed out the shadow of a laugh. “It's just...a bunch of shit, OK?"

He said it reassuringly, but it hit her like a belly flop into cold water. She pulled away, mumbled a startled “OK,” and put her head on the pillow, facing away. She clicked off the lamp beside the bed.

Frank settled down beside her, sighing at the ceiling. Karen squeezed her eyes shut, trying to figure out what it all meant, but within minutes, he had rolled onto his side and pressed his body along the line of her back, his arm snaking around her middle. He kissed her shoulder.

“If we’re doing this, I need you to know something, all right? Really know it,” he murmured. “I’m not—I’m not always going to want to talk. Doesn’t mean I don’t want you.”

Karen’s breath left her.

“You hear me?”

“Yeah,” she whispered. “Frank—”

He squeezed her tight. “Sleep,” he said, and she smiled in the dark, but she couldn’t help worrying that this would be the night the dreams did their worst.

* * *

What woke her wasn’t a nightmare, his or hers. It was raindrops tapping at the window — insistent but not unpleasant.

Karen’s eyes adjusted gradually to the darkness, to the glow of the clock on the bedside table. 3 a.m. The rain was coming down harder now, its intensity muffling the rest of the world, making it feel like they might be the only two people in it. Adrift, but not lost.

Karen rolled over carefully, attempting to get more comfortable without disturbing Frank. But he was awake.

“It’s raining,” she said, a master of observation with a sleep-thickened voice.

“That it is.”

Frank’s answer was tinged with amusement, but with no traces of sleep, and she wondered if he’d gotten any rest at all. No sleep, no nightmares — she knew that trick.

He stroked her cheek tenderly. “Karen,” he said, with so much heartbreak that the shattered pieces scraped through her chest.

“I’m here,” she promised, and his mouth was on hers, fierce and urgent.

She took it all in, all his need, and she matched it, meeting each kiss, moving into each touch. He seemed determined to seek out all of her, sliding his hands under her t-shirt until she stripped it off impatiently. He nibbled a trail down her stomach, grazing over her hip bones and her thighs until she was ready to beg for his mouth between them.

He didn’t make her beg.

She was heated and glowing when she got him underneath her, taking her time to continue the intensive course in Frank Castle studies that she’d begun a few mornings ago. Her own need got the best of her in the end, though, and she lowered herself down on him until she was full, body and soul.

She moved above him, her hair drifting over his skin and his hands on her hips. She drank in his gorgeous groans, and she thrilled when he sat up to get closer, his lips capturing hers. She gripped the back of his neck as she ground against him, flames of pleasure licking all the way through her, until she thought she might burn up completely.

It was only after — lying spent next to him, her whole body a blissful ache — that she thought to worry. That she remembered the _if_ and caught the hint of goodbye.

“Frank?” she said suddenly, rolling to her side and putting her hand on his damp chest, feeling the movement as he caught his breath.

He didn’t look at her. “I’ve tried before...to give it up.”

“Yeah,” she said as her memory knitted together bits and pieces that he’d told her.

“I did it wrong,” he said. “Left everything—everyone behind. Didn’t have enough to hold on to when the shit pulled me under again.”

She put her hand on his cheek, turned his face to hers. “Hold on to me.”

“I'm trying.”

With effort, she choked back her panic. She couldn't save him. She could only show him. She could only help him save himself.

“You don’t have to see the big picture here,” she said. “You don’t even have to believe in a future. You just have to believe in today. Believe in today, with me, and we’ll see where that gets us.”

* * *

In the morning, they followed the instructions for locking up the house and stowing the key.

“So,” Karen said, as they walked over the wet gravel to the car. “We’re doing this?”

Frank’s smile broke out then, sun through the clouds, and he nodded. “We're doing this.”


End file.
